The Age of Innocence eBook

As he moved away he saw Lawrence Lefferts, tall and
resplendent, leading his wife up to be introduced;
and heard Gertrude Lefferts say, as she beamed on the
Countess with her large unperceiving smile: “But
I think we used to go to dancing-school together when
we were children—.” Behind her,
waiting their turn to name themselves to the Countess,
Archer noticed a number of the recalcitrant couples
who had declined to meet her at Mrs. Lovell Mingott’s.
As Mrs. Archer remarked: when the van der Luydens
chose, they knew how to give a lesson. The wonder
was that they chose so seldom.

The young man felt a touch on his arm and saw Mrs.
van der Luyden looking down on him from the pure eminence
of black velvet and the family diamonds. “It
was good of you, dear Newland, to devote yourself so
unselfishly to Madame Olenska. I told your cousin
Henry he must really come to the rescue.”

He was aware of smiling at her vaguely, and she added,
as if condescending to his natural shyness: “I’ve
never seen May looking lovelier. The Duke thinks
her the handsomest girl in the room.”

IX.

The Countess Olenska had said “after five”;
and at half after the hour Newland Archer rang the
bell of the peeling stucco house with a giant wisteria
throttling its feeble cast-iron balcony, which she
had hired, far down West Twenty-third Street, from
the vagabond Medora.

It was certainly a strange quarter to have settled
in. Small dress-makers, bird-stuffers and “people
who wrote” were her nearest neighbours; and
further down the dishevelled street Archer recognised
a dilapidated wooden house, at the end of a paved
path, in which a writer and journalist called Winsett,
whom he used to come across now and then, had mentioned
that he lived. Winsett did not invite people
to his house; but he had once pointed it out to Archer
in the course of a nocturnal stroll, and the latter
had asked himself, with a little shiver, if the humanities
were so meanly housed in other capitals.

Madame Olenska’s own dwelling was redeemed from
the same appearance only by a little more paint about
the window-frames; and as Archer mustered its modest
front he said to himself that the Polish Count must
have robbed her of her fortune as well as of her illusions.

The young man had spent an unsatisfactory day.
He had lunched with the Wellands, hoping afterward
to carry off May for a walk in the Park. He
wanted to have her to himself, to tell her how enchanting
she had looked the night before, and how proud he
was of her, and to press her to hasten their marriage.
But Mrs. Welland had firmly reminded him that the
round of family visits was not half over, and, when
he hinted at advancing the date of the wedding, had
raised reproachful eye-brows and sighed out:
“Twelve dozen of everything—­hand-embroidered—­”